Motion capture specialist IKinema has demonstrated its new in-development low-cost motion capture system which uses use 6 points of SteamVR tracking points to deliver a pretty accurate recreation of real world motion.
The potential diversity of uses for Valve’s SteamVR tracking system Lighthouse is something we’ve pondered before, especially with the company recently opening up licensing for the technology for use in potentially any device. Now a company has used the laser based tracking solution as the core of its new low cost motion capture solution.
This is Project Orion from UK based motion capture specialists IKinema. The in-development solution uses just 6 points of SteamVR tracking, and has the subject in question strap HTC Vive controllers to themselves. The setup demonstrated has one SteamVR controller per foot one, at the base of the back as well as (somewhat more conventionally) two handheld units, with the 6th unit strapped to the head. All of this is tracked with the standard 2 lighthouse laser base stations.
As noted on the video above, IKinema says it’s achieved the above levels of impressive accuracy with no post production – what you’re seeing is captured and rendered in real time. What’s more, it’s not as if the subject of the film is going particularly easy on the capture system, with sideways rolls and even a couple of chimpanzee impressions thrown into the presentation. Project Orion looks to be using inverse kinematics (systems which interpret realistic motion using skeletal structure) to ‘fill in’ the blanks between tracking points and considering how many blanks there are when compared to a more traditional, industry-focused Mo-Cap setup, Orion does remarkably well.
We’ll be interested to see where IKinema take Project Orion in the future, whether it’ll be another licensee to Valve’s open Lighthouse tracking initiative with a hardware solution of its own for example.